Winamp

A: Very good question! Winamp is another of the many multimedia players that are available on the Internet today. We’ve covered most of the others, such as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc., so I figured this would be a good time to share the world of Winamp with you all as well.

Most of the music players these days all do pretty much the same thing, but as I’ve said before, they also all bring something a little different to the table. And Winamp does not disappoint. Okay, let’s start with the beginning facts. Winamp was designed by the Nullsoft company and they were eventually taken over by AOL. Winamp is back under the Nullsoft control now though. It was released first by Justin Frankel in 1997 and started out as a multi-format freeware and shareware player.

Things have changed a little since then with Winamp though. Now, along with playing any music, it is also able to play streamed video material, either live or recorded from around the world. The current Winamp creators are Tag Loomis, Taber Buhl, Ben Allison, Maksim Tyrtyshny and Will Fisher. Sometimes it’s interesting to know who is behind all of the developments of these types of things, so I thought I would fill you all in!

Needless to say, Winamp has grown much bigger in the last few years. It is now credited to over 52 million monthly users, which makes it the third most used multimedia player available globally today (in 2006). That’s up from the 33 million users it had in the year 2005.

Okay, now for the stuff you’re probably most interested in. Winamp’s developers wanted to keep the player on a community level and that is why it has such a big and active following. Winamp is probably most known for the different skins it offers, along with all of the features and visualizers. Winamp is always coming out with something different in terms of a new feature, etc. You’ll never get bored with what it has to offer.

As a bonus, Winamp focuses its development on four distinct goals. The first is to have a continued focus on the size and performance of the player, the second is to be able to support the widest range of audio and video formats of the major players, the third being to continue its unique features to be able to offer the highest quality output from any multimedia player and the last is to keep designing a player that will aid to the community as much as possible. You can’t go wrong with those goals! Although Winamp has already been successful with those, they won’t stop until they know its users are completely satisfied.

There are, of course, different versions of Winamp that are available for download online today, but the most recent is Winamp 5.3. You can download it directly from their Web site here. You can also check out all of the different features through that link. So, if you’ve never used Winamp before or if you’re a current user, check out what Winamp is all about. You won’t be disappointed!

~ Erin

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on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 2:35 PM and is filed under Multimedia.
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